Friend #5 - Kate

The interesting thing I’ve learned about meeting a person for the first time is that it usually only allows you to see them in the current moment.  Whether the observer is aware of it or not, the other person’s reality is colored by what is going on in their life, whether it’s happy or sad or chaotic or nostalgic.  If you listen closely the subconscious is drifting to whatever is at the forefront of their mind, and in a way the words passing through their lips are the reflection of their subconscious. 

Typically, there is a common theme that presents itself but no one’s life is comprised of just one theme.  We are all made up of different parts, feelings, moods and stages of life.  Our lives are a jigsaw puzzle of opposites that give our reality depth instead of reading as one flat character on a page.  In the moment, we all typically wear just one mask to show the world, but sometimes, you find a rare person who will throw all the masks on at once and sit across from you wearing what might seem to be an outrageous dress-up costume, like the kind young children put together.  Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of sitting across from one such enigma.  Her name is Kate.

Kate went to high school with an old co-worker of mine and volunteered for this experiment.  She is a brick wall of exuberance so over-powering that my first reaction was to try to move past the wall to see what makes Kate…well, Kate.  And come to find out, Kate is no stranger to wearing masks.

When Kate was twelve-years-old, her father was killed by a drunk driver.  He was coming back from the grocery store when a car jumped the sidewalk.  One day, he was Kate’s loving father and the next day he was gone.  It was as shocking as if a black hole had suddenly swallowed her up.  And the next morning, Kate’s mother woke her and her brother and said, “Time for school.”  And Kate had to put on the mask that everything was normal even though her entire world had crumbled around her.    As a child, she wasn’t given the opportunity to grieve.  She felt she had to be strong for her mother.  It’s the reason she has such a passion for helping children grieve now.  She’s become a bit of an expert on the topic, but over the last year, her mother and grandmother passed away in quick succession.  “Did you take the proper time to grieve this time?” I asked and to my surprise, she said, “No”.  Old habits die hard.

At around the same time Kate’s mother and grandmother passed away, Kate had a new boss who was hired to come into her place of employment.  It didn’t take long until the women clashed.  Kate admitted part of the problem may have been that she hadn’t taken the proper time to grieve.  So now, she has to don an invisible mask of submission every week as she sits and listens to her boss lecture her about her “anger problems”.  The only thing Kate is really angry about is that she has to spend time listening to this woman that she fundamentally disagrees with on virtually every managerial tactic she uses.  But it’s a job.  And she’s the sole income earner.  And she has kids.  And that submissive mask is one a lot of us have to bear.

But there are other, happier masks, she wears, too.  Kate is adventurous.  When Bob Barker announced he was retiring from the Price Is Right, she gathered up a group, made it on stage and won a diamond solitaire ring, a trip to Paris and a PT Cruiser.  I asked about the taxes.  “Totally worth it,” Kate said laughing.  And once when Kate was walking down the Las Vegas Strip, she came face to face with Vanilla Ice.  She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him while screaming.  “Oh my God, you’re Vanilla Ice!”  Of course, he promptly ran away.  Kate and I agreed he probably didn’t like that.  Another time, she was in New York, looked over and Michael J. Fox was standing next to her.  This time she calmly just said, “You’re Michael J. Fox,” and he gave her a look as if to say, “C’mon, lady, I’m with my kids.”  I guess celebrities wear masks, too.

There is a playfulness about Kate that makes me wonder if her father’s death has caused her to have a delayed childhood.  Or maybe she was always meant to be fun-loving.  I’m not entirely sure.  When Kate was at an age when most of her friends were going off to college, her best friend told her that she either needed to get serious about her life, because she was going nowhere, or they were going to have to stop being friends.  To Kate’s credit, she got serious and went to college, solely because she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her friend.  (She did choose the easiest major though.)  There is such a whimsical easiness about her that you would think she’d be a pushover.  That’s not the case either.

Once when Kate and her family were dining in a restaurant, Kate’s seven-year-old daughter asked to go to the bathroom by herself.  Kate said yes because she could see the door from where she was sitting.  Moments later she heard her daughter’s blood curdling scream.  She rushed to the restroom area not knowing what was going on and found her daughter, lying on the floor, holding her hand with blood spurting from her thumb.  There was a woman coming out of the restroom just as the little girl was going in and Kate’s daughter got her thumb stuck in the crevasse.  The impact severed the thumb nearly off. 

Kate and her husband immediately put both their daughters in the car and rushed to the nearest emergency room.  It took a monumental amount of sedation to calm Kate’s daughter once they reached the hospital, but once the little girl was sedated, the staff came to Kate and said they were going to have to amputate the thumb.  There was just no saving it.

Kate put her foot down.  “No, here’s what you are going to do,” she said with authority.  “You are going to call a hand surgeon and after that, you are going to call a plastic surgeon.  We are going to hear what they have to say and then we will make some decisions.”  As Kate relayed the story to me, I could see her in my mind’s eye standing there like a bull, with horns lowered and nostrils flaring, an unyielding force.  Two days later the hand surgeon stitched up her daughter’s thumb and it has heeled nicely.

Of course, then there were medical bills.  Kate reached out to the restaurant which initially appeared to be concerned but as the medical bills began to pile up, the restaurant balked.  They only offered to pay one thousand dollars of the total medical costs.  Kate reached out to several attorneys but apparently, because this particular restaurant was a franchise, their legal obligation was limited.  Finally Kate said, “Listen, I realize you have no legal obligation to pay these bills and I’m not looking to get rich here.  I just want my daughter’s medical bills paid.  You can do whatever you want but just know that if these bills aren’t paid, I have nothing better to do in the summer than sit outside your establishment with a sign that says my daughter severed her thumb in your restaurant.”  …And the medical bills were paid.

So that’s Kate.  She is fun-loving but headstrong.  She is adventurous, laughs a lot…yet I wouldn’t cross her.  She is a force so strong you can literally feel it in her presence, yet she is also delightfully gentle.  I spent quite a bit of time with her poking around, asking questions, feeling around for layers just beneath the surface I couldn’t quite reach.  I kept feeling there were doors that were locked to me as a stranger, areas of her heart and mind that maybe Kate doesn’t even allow herself to explore.  And that’s okay.  We are all a little like that.  It’s easier to put on a mask than to look into the dark corners of our souls, but she is real.  And she is steadfast.  And I look forward to more of her adventures.